“I’ll walk you to your room. Can I walk you to the school bus tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” she said, “we’ve got all day.”

Lord, I thought, as the predictive delights of the weekend impacted on me, my cup runneth over. I went to bed aglow with lost innocence, having gained heaven by abandoning virtue.

How, I wondered, had evil endured in the world, persisted, once copulation was discovered?

SEVENTEEN
KNOCKOUT

I awoke to a pounding on the door, disoriented, vaguely aware that I had been interrupted in some irretrievable dream of deep, surreal merriment.

“Yeah?” My voice was a knot of frogs. The door opened and Abdul stood in the threshold.

“Sorry,” he said solemnly, “but I wanted to say good-bye.”

I pulled on a pair of shorts, pants—where the hell had I dropped last night’s shirt? My watch said 11:40. “Where’re you going?” I asked.

“We’re going to New York, with Derek.”

“Well,” I held out my hand. And then the pronoun struck me. “You say ‘we’?”

“Valerie and I.”

“She can’t go,” I said unequivocally. “She’s got to finish school.”

He looked at me as if I were talking nonsense, which I was. I threw on a sweater and he followed me out the door.

They were in that squalid garden behind the house, Derek leaning slackly against the abandoned refrigerator, she seated stiffly on the bench beside the rickety table.

“What’s going on?” I asked coldly.

She pulled her terry-cloth robe tight around her and looked away. At least she had the goodness to not meet my gaze, and the dignity not to say a mumbled word.

Derek tilted his ten-gallon hat far back on his head, revealing a face that was all smirk. “What’s going on,” he said, “is none of your beeswax.”

Beeswax. His was the loose vocabulary of a child; like a child he was to be ignored in the serious business at hand. I took a step toward Valerie. He lurched between us with the rolling gait of a bronc-buster and stood taut.

“I’m gonna crawl yore frame,” he said, which was positively logorrheic for Derek the Silent, and with a Montana twang yet. We stood there, glowering at each other. “Messin’ with me,” he added, “is like tryna jerk off a wildcat.” He curled his hands into fists.

She said, “Derek. Don’t.”

“Don’t, my butt,” he drawled.